💬 Who did you become in the process of waiting? 🌌

Our monthly(ish) community prompt

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make.
That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”

—Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise

In her oft-quoted 1976 Regents Lecture at UC Berkeley, “Why I Write,” a title borrowed from George Orwell, Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

This July will mark two years of writing personal essays about the stickier sides of running a small business, and I find Didion’s words to ring true: I often start with the seeds of an idea—a prompt or small story from my life—but I don’t know how I truly feel about the topic, or what I have learned, until I start writing. Meaning unfurls slowly as I tap away, especially as the draft simmers for a few days (ideally weeks) before going live, like invisible ink or one of those MagicEye posters.

That was certainly the case with the story I shared most recently in the final installment of my “Lucky Seedling” series, about a licensing client that circled back from seeds planted five years prior. I ended with this line:

“It’s an unexpected bounty years in the making, and we become someone else in the process of waiting.”